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- CURRENTLY ONLY AVAILABLE ON PBE -

We’re kicking off the rollout of Champion Mastery with a PBE stint from 3/11. If all goes well, a couple of weeks later we’ll then launch a beta in a single region, focusing on Summoner’s Rift normal queues to make sure the feature’s stable for expanded use. We’ll read through your feedback and keep you updated with our progress, too, so keep an eye out for future posts after the service goes live!

CHAMPION MASTERY

The mastery system is designed to recognize a player’s respective investment in a champion and uses skill-based progression to measure advancement. When a player wins a game, they’ll earn CP (champion points) toward mastery levels for that champion, and get rewards along the way. The amount of CP earned is heavily weighted by team performance.

Champion Points are earned for winning a game with a particular champion. Earning CP will allow you to gain Mastery Levels in that champion and earn rewards as you progress. Points are based on your team’s performance as well as your own contribution. You can see how much CP you earn at the end of each game.

NOTE: Your previous games will NOT count towards your CP.

Keep in mind that you’ll earn slightly more CP if you team up with other players in a premade before your game. The larger your premade team is, the higher the additional bonus will be.

Premade Size

Premade Bonus

Party of one

No bonus

Party of two

10% of CP earned

Party of three

20% of CP earned

Party of four

30% of CP earned

Party of five

50% of CP earned

For example, if you team up with two other players (for a total of 3 players in your premade) and earn 25 CP at the end of your game, you will receive an additional 20% of your 25 CP — 5 CP. This will give you a total of 30 CP earned.’

At the end of your game, you can hover over your Champion Mastery points bar to see the grade our new system gives you. These grades are awarded based on your performance in the role with the champion you’re playing and where you’re playing them.

At launch, only Summoner’s Rift normal queues will be eligible. Once we’re sure the feature is stable, we’ll look at expanding to other maps and modes. Please share your feedback so we can work together to improve this feature.

This is a way to display your achievement with a champion in game. Just like existing emotes (laugh, dance, etc), it is bound to a key. The binding will be listed next to emotes in the key binding menu:

You can also use a slash-command to use the emote. Hit enter to bring up the command prompt then type “/masterybadge.”

As we kick off a new season of the EU LCS, Trevor “Quickshot” Henry and Martin “Deficio” Lynge will be heading up the caster team hosting 2015’s live broadcast from our studio in Berlin. Moving into leading roles within the team, Quickshot and Deficio will be helping to guide viewers through a brand new season of LCS action — including guest spots along with Eefje “Sjokz” Depoortere on the new League show, PTL.

In addition to this core duo, new face Devin “PiraTechnics” Younge will be joining the EU LCS caster lineup. Formerly of the LPLen team that brought the Chinese LoL pro stream to Western fans, PiraTechnics will be making his debut during the first week of the season.

This season, we’re also adding an analyst desk in EU to offer post-game in-depth analysis with expert commentators. Hosted by Sjokz, the desk will feature guest commentators and analysts to break down the day’s action, including Worlds analyst and pro Mitch “Krepo” Voorspoels for week one. In the future, more guests and pros will be rotating to pick up the conversation live in studio, so look out for more announcements in the coming weeks.

Over at the EU Challenger Series, Richard “Pulse” Kam and James “Stress” O’Leary will be helming the caster desk. A familiar duo to viewers of the LCS Expansion Tournament, Pulse and Stress will oversee the games as Challenger teams fight for a spot in the EU LCS.

We hope to add to our EU LCS lineup in the next few months, but are excited to be kicking off the action from our new studio space with this collection of talented casters. With new and reshuffled teams battling seasoned veterans and a brand new EU LCS studio home, we’re looking forward to a 2015 season full of fierce competition in Europe!

Deman and Joe Miller have chosen to stay in Cologne, where they will be working for ESL on other events.

Welcome back to Rift Pulse, a weekly roundup of all things LoL eSports. This week follows the start of the LCS, the announcement of a Mid-Season Invitational, a brand new weekly show by Riot, and more.

North America

Team Liquid announced their foray into the Challenger Scene with Liquid Academy.

Alex Ich will be starting as the Mid Laner for Brawl, in addition to being a substitute for Team 8.

How does it feel to qualify for the LCS again after multiple close attempts? How do you stay motivated?

It feels really good, especially since I’ve been on this team for months and we’ve all worked hard in the gaming house to make it happen. Winning by a 3-2 margin was just one of the best feelings I’ve ever had. It was amazing that me and my teammates perserved after losing 2 games to tie the series. Honestly a good amount of my motivation comes from when I lose horribly to my opponents. Sometimes there’s a lot of mental blocks like the enemy is bad and just lucky etc but sometimes the enemy plays really agressive and just outplays you the whole game so I always want to strive to do better than them but at the same time perfect my play so I can try to be the best in the world.

Is this the strongest team you’ve been on so far? How do you believe you will perform in the LCS, and do you think you can reach the top 6?

Yea it’s definitely the strongest team I’ve qualified with but myself and the other players on my team take a good amount of time to adapt to the meta. so atm we’re not doing super well but I believe in my teams potential and the hard work that they put in. The first split might be shaky but I definitely think we can make top 3 and go to worlds in 2015.

Who are you most looking forward to playing against? More specifically who do you think will be the biggest challenge for your team?

I’m excited to play almost every team. I think there’s never been so much talent in LCS ever, I am excited to watch and play against a lot of the talented players who I believe will become huge carry superstars: Quas, Pobelter, Impaler, Crumbzz, Cali(no pressurino) etc.

Who do you feel is the biggest threat to you in the bot lane?

I think most bot lanes have better mechanics than us but I think me and dodo have a strong strategic mind so as long as we don’t blunder super hard I think sneaky and lemon will be the biggest threat as they have strong mechanics and brains meaning I should cheese them with my good old kennen ADC.

How much do you think the role of AD has changed in the recent patches? What changes do you like or dislike most? Is there anything you would change before the new season starts?

I don’t think it’s changed too much, it feels like a lot of junglers can do significantly more damage though making the early game more difficult for ADCs. Riot has nerfed a lot of the ADC’s recently so now they’re all pretty similarly balanced. Corki doesn’t have a ridiculous edge anymore because Sivir OP.

What are the biggest obstacles in playing in Challenger and the road to the LCS? Do you feel Riot is taking the right steps in creating a viable path to the Pro Scene?

Well everyone kind of starts off in Challengerland and its just not cutthroat enough in a way. You have to beat an LCS team to make it in so you gotta assemble a really strong challenger team to do that. When the current roster of team 8 formed we were slightly behind the monstrous LMQ in skill but had a good record against most teams. A bad seeding (partially our fault but also ranked 5’s is a horrible way to bracket because for example : if seed 1 was LMQ seed 18 would avoid seed 1 until finals but 20,10,11,2,19,9,12 are all doomed to face seed 1 early to the point where they wouldn’t get enough points to get into the playoff stage.

How do you feel about the new teams entering the LCS and of them who do you feel is strongest?

I thought Coast would be really good coming into the tournament but they looked a little shaky. I think they’ll eventually pick it up and be a huge threat in terms of mechanics and laning phase. Also Impaler seems to be ‘slightly’ good at jungling. Curse Academy was on and off amazing they would seemingly play teamfights brilliantly and then follow it up with them getting picked off multiple times. I think if CA fixes that they’d be a similar team to C9 with absolutely dominant team fighting pressure.

It seems that newer teams have trouble not being relegated. Is this just not adjusting properly to the level of play or not changing practice habits? What plays most into this?

Don’t know. It seems like a lot of the teams end up disliking each other when they finish low in the standings. I thought Complexity had really strong ward control but it seemed that our teamwork and essentially chemistry was better than CoL for teamfights which decided most games.

How was it subbing for Lyon Gaming? What was it like playing with a squad from a different region?

I just wanted to have fun. We didn’t get a huge amount of practice so it was kind of an uphill battle and then during the tournament games we ran completely different stuff. Wish there was a loser’s bracket so we could’ve played against pain they were really cool people that I met during the afterparty. It’d also help the international scene grow!

What are your overall thoughts on IEM San Jose? How is playing on an international stage compared to the LCS or even Challenger? What did you learn most?

I sucked but people were congratulating me for shooting a rocket that got me a triple kill when Seiya completely set up that play LOL. I wasn’t on my game because I wasn’t used to how uncomfortable earbuds + tight headsets were. It was very painful for me but I made a few amateurish mistakes so I gotta just work harder so that doesn’t happen next time.Draven. Will we get to see him again? Where does he fit in 4.21 and what types of AD carries do you enjoy most right now?

Draven is always playable but a very unsafe pick. He’s got the damage potential though and the dollah bills. In the current patch I still love Corki. He’s absolutely broken after triforce is finished, I feel like I always have 2k+ gold on my next back. He’s insanely flexible and still super OP imo.

Shoutouts?

Shoutout to all the m8’s who have supported the team. Be sure to follow the team on twitter because we’re eventually gonna have a store that will sell hella stuff! Shoutout to our sponsors Freedom, CyberpowerPC and Wearhaus and all the people that want hugs at live events. Hugs are cool.

Welcome to the second edition of Rift Pulse, a weekly roundup of all things LoL eSports. This week follows the end of the EU and NA expansion tournaments, the 2015 Challenger Series, the conclusion of IEM and much more.

North America

Shan “Chaox” Huang has officially joined a new Challenger team, Roar. The team has already begun bootcamping in China.

3 red posts in the last week on EUW? I suck. It’s been a busy weekend as I went to Play Expo in Manchester to check out some university esports, followed by a short spate of illness (curse you, Irish weather!) but I’m back.

I feel we’re due for an impromptu Q&A! Feel free to ask anything and I’ll do my best to answer!

Draggles reserves the right to not answer any question that he deems to be dangerous to his future career prospects or to Riot as a company… or anything that will make him look stupid. Trolls beware!

So it’s just over 3 weeks to the end of the season (November 11th 00:01 GMT). A lot of the proposed changes can be found on the PBE Boards and more specific stuff on this post. There’s a hell of a lot of changes – most will need to relearn the jungle as there are brand new items that build out of Hunter’s Machete. There’s also the possibility of a new, roaming camp in the river, as well as repeated-Dragon-killing buffs. Not all of this is going to make it in to the final preseason patch but it’s certainly an idea of our direction.

I think this may all be hitting on the 11th but there might be a small delay between end of the 2014 Season and the preseason changes. We’ll be giving you more context on these shortly before we push the patch to live.

I think we’re holding off on rebalancing specific champions until we see how the preseason plays out – it’s going to radically change the meta overall. Obviously we have a couple of patches to go before the 11th November (providing we keep to the biweekly schedule), so any last-minute tune-ups could still come about then.

Completely understand your concerns, but I feel it’s best to see how the first couple of weeks of preseason play out before you make too many judgements. Strategic diversity/multiple win conditions are our aims for preseason, but it’s honestly something we’ll have to wait and see as to which way it goes.

I don’t remember seeing it announced, and the crazy thing about reworks is sometimes they fall through, or something else takes priority. I’d love to see Shaco reworked; put some character into his moveset that compliments his actual lore in the same way that Braum’s and Jinx’s moves are representative of their characters. The problem with a Shaco rework is that his stealth, his boxes and his clone are all iconic features of his moveset and so it would be tough to distance him from these.

Like in the case of Sion, before he was a axe-wielding zombie Schwarzenegger with a pink shield and a stunning look. Like, what? HOW DOES THIS MAKE SENSE? Now he’s much more thematically cohesive – much like his story where he is an unstoppable juggernaut, he has so many moves that fully represent that, while still keeping his quintessential shield/axe. I’d like to see this sort of thing happen to Shaco if and when a rework goes ahead.

We keep MMR calculations under wraps. I’m being completely honest here when I say that this information is also kept from most people, including me. Everything I know about matchmaking comes from this Knowledge Base article. I do know that op.gg or any third party sites don’t have access to this info, so any figures they associate with your account are estimations only.

It is very rare for patches to affect ping unless we drastically change our infrastructure. Unfortunately there are so many jumps in each connection from your PC to our platform that it’s very difficult to give an “overall diagnosis” for any problem. Needless to say if the problem is immediately fixable from our end, we get on it straight away. If it’s an ISP issue we will reach out to ISPs to find out what’s going on. It could be the backbone ISP (the one that services all the ISPs in a region) or a degraded connection somewhere along the line.

Honestly your best bet, when experiencing high ping or packet loss, is to run this tool, and look for high numbers along the way. If you don’t want to do that, feel free to post them on the forum and it becomes a hell of a lot easier to specify just what’s giving your connection the hump.

What sort of hiccups in particular are you experiencing? We had a brief moment of downtime and a server restart a couple of weeks ago, but we’ve actually been able to really improve the quality and quantity of the uptime we have – so much so, that we’re planning to move EUNE to the datacentre in the not-too-distant future.

This is always something that has affected us on the EUW forums. The fact of the matter is that EU just has fewer employees than NA, as well as having different specialisations. With cross log-in on Boards, however, this problem should be a thing of the past for English-speaking players. And in fact, if you wanted to talk to some devs right this minute, you can use your EUW login to discuss gameplay and champion/item balance or talk to the story/art team. Just make sure your region is set to EU West in the top left. Also remember timezones are a thing. With the majority of the main game devs 8 hours behind at the minimum, the crossover “quality time” period is a matter of 2 or 3 hours each day.

Ooh, interesting thought! Would open up a lot of champions to be viable, but then it would also become a “must buy” on every champion. Not sure we want to enforce something this heavily that it would be useful for ALL ROLES. Aside from wards, of course.

I don’t know if there’s anything coming for Sightstone, but I feel with some of the new jungle vision changes (killing the Raptors (currently Wraiths) gives you the ability to see invisible units for a short time the next time you are caught by an enemy ward, for example), the vision game may change all over again.

All the time. I miss it a lot of the time. In some ways I miss the crazy late nights and the caffeine overload but I’m glad I’m now with the company that made it all possible. In fact, I’ve been here 10 months today!

Several Champions have dust covering them on their official pages, so look forward to reveals soon! Riot have posted up new job applications for Research and Development and have now confirmed they’re looking into making new games; in another official blog, players who’ve referred 10,000 people or above will finally get their chance to design a Champion (note that 2% of Champion designs actually make it in the game). 3rd Party Apps are now allowed, lots of lore and story progression is heading to League’s client and official website, a discussion on the removal of Janna’s tattoo and a bug where some spells were automatically cast after others is being resolved.

Today we posted this somewhat ambiguous job description for talented, risk-taking pros who love the open-ended path of R&D (research and development). Of course, we’re also still seeking those who love the ongoing challenge of constantly shipping content and maintaining a live service like League of Legends, but R&D teams require folks eager to work in a more experimental kind of dev environment.

We know posting a JD calling out R&D initiatives will raise some questions and kick up some speculation, so we’re sharing a few thoughts about all of our open development roles, including R&D.

We’ve mentioned developing games other than League of Legends in the past, but we’re not ready to announce, discuss, or launch any new games yet or anytime soon™. When we are, League of Legends players will be the first to know. These future games might be from large teams or smaller teams at Riot, but no matter the size of the team working on them, they will be the types of games that we all love to play.

WHAT IS R&D @ RIOT?

At Riot, R&D involves small teams working without constraints, with the freedom to fail and learn, incubating great games and great ideas. The idea isn’t blind trial and error, but a scientific method that relies on instincts, experience, and process to discover a creative result.

We’ve only got a few R&D projects going at a time, with a handful of people on each team. We’re exploring some familiar genres and some experimental ones, but all of them are genres we expect core gamers love. We don’t know how many (if any) of these explorations will ever ship.

So does this mean we’re pulling Rioters away from League of Legends? Definitely not. League of Legends is still our #1 priority and will be for a long time.

As an R&D team member, you’d ideate, explore, debate, and develop across game genres and concepts that’ll eventually help Riot Game become Riot Games. We’re looking for veteran developers and gamers from a wide variety of disciplines, so if you have a passion for the R&D phase of game development, expertise that can contribute to bringing a project to life, a high tolerance for setbacks and changing direction, then check out the gig, here: R&D JD.

About five years ago, not long after the debut of League of Legends, we launched the refer-a-friend program to reward players who invite their friends to play the game. For bringing friends into the game, players could reap rewards from forum flair to free skins (50 referrals) to a commemorative plaque in Riot’s office (500 referrals) to a piece of named content (1,000 referrals) to a trip to Riot’s offices in Los Angeles to help us develop a champion (10,000 referrals).

Thanks in large part to passionate players telling their friends about the game, League of Legends grew faster and larger than anyone could’ve predicted. We’re extremely grateful to every player who encouraged even a single friend to play League of Legends — we couldn’t have done it without you.

As we sunset the original refer-a-friend program, we’re checking in to make sure we’ve fulfilled all of these promises. At the higher reward levels, we’ve still got some work to do. We’re nearly finished with the plaques. The wall of plaques outside the Riot PC Bang looks great and is a frequent stop on tours.

We’re still naming content after players as promised. So far, we’ve named seven pieces of in-game content after players, and have 11 more to go. As we head into the 2015 season, we’ll be looking for opportunities to name some more content after players and we’ll continue to do so in future seasons as well.

Regarding the ultimate promise to develop a champion, the idea itself was pretty flawed — we were a young company five years ago, and didn’t really think through how we were going to successfully deliver the “develop a champion” promise. We now know that champions take an average of about six months to develop, during which time close to a hundred people have a hand in the design and development of that champion, cumulatively contributing well over 10,000 hours of work to each champion that ships, so the idea that a single person could completely develop a champion in a two-day trip was frankly rather silly, but we still want to fix this in a meaningful way.

Some time ago, we did make an attempt to to fulfill the ten thousand referral promise, but we didn’t really hit the mark. We flew uber referrers to LA for a day including a tour, review of work-in-process content, a collaborative design sesh, and a trip to an amusement park.

We’re going to try again, and this time we think we’ve got a way to make it truly reflect the weight of champion development as was intended with this program reward. We’ll be reaching out to everyone who legitimately earned the top reward, but we’re sharing the plan here as well.

So here’s the idea. There’s this thing Rioters do called Thunderdome. We’re going to invite every uber-referrer to a Thunderdome event next year in which they’ll get to spend at least three intense days designing and developing a champion, getting it to at least “paper prototype” status.

Working with a dedicated team of Rioters including a champ designer, narrative writer and concept artist, the participants will build concept art, a paper kit (champion abilities), champion bio and any extra story elements that help define the character.

After Thunderdome, we’ll commit to carrying these champion concepts forward into further design and development. We do need to set expectations by noting here that fewer than 2% of champion concepts ever make it into the game and can’t show any favoritism. The Thunderdome concepts will have the same chance as any internal design to make it into League as a realized champion. However far the concept makes it, we’ll keep reward winners updated.

We’re also going to add a bunch of bonus extras to the trip including swag, noms with Rioters, a visit to the NA LCS, and gaming with Rioters in the PC Bang. We’re still hammering out the specifics, but we’re going to make damned sure that the core champion design experience delivers on our promise.

We all know League is more fun with friends, and these players brought tens of thousands of friends into the game. We want to make sure that these players feel that Riot’s a company that keeps its promises. We didn’t want to just say sorry and move on. It might’ve taken five years, but we’re gonna do it right.

I wanted to jump back into this discussion to share some updates. As those following this topic know, back in the spring we made some clarifications that 3rd party applications with particular functions were considered against our Terms of Service (that link goes to the old Forums thread, which is a mirror of this one), and that the use of such applications was prohibited (and could even potentially lead to disciplinary actions). One of the several contributing factors to this topic was the early beta of Curse Voice and recent updates to Razer Comms, and the conversations that arose around them.

Over the past few months we have been working with the developers of many applications, including Curse and Razer. Because of this, the latest revision of Curse Voice (version 6.1.X) and Razer Comms (version 2.1.X) no longer violate our current guidelines. I should note, however, that with all third party apps these situations are subject to change as programs evolve, and this issue may be revisited in the future if the situation warrants it. Also… Curse Voice, Razer Comms, and all other 3rd party programs are not supported by Riot. Because of that, we can never guarantee the user experience when they and other programs are run in tandem with League of Legends. We always suggesting disabling such programs in your first step towards any troubleshooting, should problems arise

We’re currently tracking this to find a proper fix (due to the nature of the bug we can’t make any promises on a timeline) but, in the meantime, the best workaround is to slightly delay your cast combinations to accommodate.

These are good points, but note I didn’t say we never alter an in-game model to match the splash. I said rarely. Janna’s tattoo, as I understand it, was an addition to an otherwise plain splash. Sona’s tattoo was really prominent and added a lot to her character (Pentakill band member…? yeah, tattoos work there). A tattoo on Janna is not really befitting of her pure, windy self. (That last part is totally my opinion). Does that make sense?

This is not to say we won’t ever add it. But as it stands now, we are not adding it to the ingame model.

Ghostcrawler answers forum drama regarding players being ignored in the development process of League and delves into the community split on reworks and who the game should be balanced for. Morello continues the discussion regarding Soraka’s upcoming rework and, more specifically, her passive making her squishier. Finally, a few suggestions about more functions for the Smart Ping wheel and an explanation on Reddit by Socrates regarding the extreme LP losses Diamond players in EUW have been experiencing lately.

One of the things that really infuses the workplace here is value that players are the most important thing, period. I am convinced that Rioters really believe that in their souls and we’re pretty good about not hiring people who aren’t bought into that value. If it has felt lately that we’re putting ourselves up on a pedestal over you guys, then that’s just a communication failure on our part. I love that aspect of Riot. We aren’t the VIPs; you guys are. If you don’t feel that way, then we’re just going to have to work harder to convince you.

Now, I’m not going to comment on the story elements at all. That’s not my gig and I’m not armed with the proper context to have that conversation. Apologies in advance.

I can talk about the champion updates and related issues about gameplay such as the Fortify and defensive play topics mentioned by the OP.

First, we don’t know better than players. We have some experience making games and hopefully we’ve hired folks with some natural talent for game development, but at the end of the day players are going to decide if they play the game or not. To put it in a bland business sentiment, this product is for you. The biggest challenge here is that players rarely speak with one voice. It may seem to you that “everyone” wanted a champion changed in a certain way or even all the “X players” really liked a specific identity that we decided to change. It’s just rarely that cut and dried. (And man, this job would be so much easier if it were.)

Remember that only a small minority of players ever post on forums, or reach out to us on Reddit or Twitter, and also remember most of you are only viewing those conversations in one or two languages at most. What may seem like universal consensus is rarely anything close to that.

And that’s okay! We’re not trying to design a game based on community vote, and you probably wouldn’t be happy with the results anyway. We do very much value player feedback and we use it to make informed decisions. That’s the reason I cracked open this (long) thread this morning — to see what you guys thought.

To provide some context on champion updates specifically, here is the way I view player sentiment. Feel free to disagree.

Player response, again IMO, generally falls into one of these categories:

1) I am indifferent to this champion or her changes.2) I play the champion because she is broken, so I’m not going to be happy once she is fixed.3) I believe the champion needs to be updated, but I am excited about one particular direction, which is unlikely to be the one Riot chooses.4) I believe the champion needs to be updated, and either Riot managed to pick the direction I liked, or I was happy just to see an update period.

Out of those four categories, you’re going to see a lot of communication from players in groups 2 and 3. Indifferent group 1 dudes are unlikely to post that they are still indifferent. Group 4 might post a little. As a result, it can feel like there is a lot of negative sentiment every time we make a change. We keep gathering data though, to make sure in the long term that the champ is getting more play and that players are enjoying playing her. To be fair, we sometimes miss the mark, or frequently a champion requires a few subsequent rounds of updates to really deliver on the promise of the update.

I’m not sure of a better way to operate other than considering player feedback in this way. I don’t think polls or votes would really be a strong way to design a game. I’m not sure how we could isolate the most hardcore or passionate players of a specific champion and redesign her with the aim of pleasing those dudes. We’re totally open to suggestions though. How would you determine the best way to update a champion? I’m not asking because we are without a process, but because some of you don’t seem happy with that process.

The point I was trying to make was that forum posts aren’t good quantitative (numeric) sources of data. They are excellent qualitative (value) sources of data.

Saying “everyone is saying X” doesn’t provide a ton of information, and is almost certainly not technically true. We get less information out of something like “100 posters agree with me that Nidalee sucks” and a lot more about reading something like “What I really liked about Nidalee was how she threw spears across the map. If I had wanted a champion that changed into an animal, I would have picked Shyvana.”

Again, there is a difference among “we know better than you” and “we make decisions informed by what you’re saying” and “we go implement whatever you want.” We shoot for the middle option if that wasn’t obvious.

Okay, that’s fair. I was describing the feedback once we’d already announced that we’re working on an update, but there are players who are reasonably happy with the state of a current champion and think he or she needs tweaks at most. Point taken.

A lot goes into determining the order of champion updates. Here are just a few elements:

– Maybe someone is already working on another champion, but it’s taking longer.– Maybe we’re trying to coordinate a visual update with a gameplay update.– Maybe we don’t have a good idea yet for how to update a particular champ.– Maybe an update won’t help because the champ in question is being dominated by another in the same role with even worse counterplay, so nobody is going to play the former until the latter is always fixed.

This is one of those threads that has gone on so long in so many different directions that it’s difficult to respond to the variety of comments. Nonetheless, I’ll try to hit a few common responses.

“You guys need to engage with us more.”

We’d love to, but what specifically do you mean by that? I don’t have the breadth of knowledge or even the bandwidth to debate point-by-point every topic that comes up in GD. I don’t want to get into the situation where we have to convince the community to allow us to make a change. That would be remarkably inefficient and risks feeling like the crowd sourcing model that I said we wanted to avoid. However, if there are specific opportunities to talk to players that you think we are missing, we’d definitely consider those. I am thrilled that some of you mentioned you feel like we have gotten better about providing context for design changes. That’s awesome, but there’s still a lot more we can do.

“You’re just making an argument for why you don’t have to listen to us.”

This makes me sad, because it’s the exact opposite of the impression I was trying to make. Let me try another angle. How many times do you make a point on GD or anywhere and have someone else disagree? Many of those threads go on quite long because you might think a champ is oppressive while someone else thinks they are fine, or underpowered, or just needs a small tweak. In these frequent situations where there is a lack of consensus, how are we supposed to navigate the right path, when almost every design change (or even lack of change) is going to disappoint someone? (And if you think you’ve seen a thread where “everyone” agrees on a design change, I’d love to see it.)

Again, this is how feedback works. If you tell us your concerns, your goals, your ideas, then we will consider them as we make changes. We also seek feedback after a change to see if it’s hit the mark, and then frequently iterate over the course of a few patches before we feel like we’ve really accomplished the goal of the update. Do you really want a game where we implement every change that gets posted on GD? Wouldn’t that be terrifying? If not, how would you decide who to listen to or not?

We love feedback and we do appreciate it when you take the time to post something. For all the complaints you may still have about League, I suspect you’d have a whole lot more if the feedback cycle didn’t work to improve things over time.

“You’re calling us a vocal minority.”

The point I was trying to make is that quantifying this or any forum is challenging and prone to abuse. In the end, the numbers don’t really matter. It comes down to the strength of arguments. We aren’t trying to make the majority happy. We’re trying to make everyone happy, without watering down the game, as ridiculous a goal as that sounds.

Here is another example. A couple of months ago, USA players were taking us/me to task for not nerfing Lee Sin. While he had some defenders in that thread, it was, to be fair, pretty one-sided. I said we thought he was too good at too many things. The next day the Chinese forums exploded with a lot of players who love the way Lee plays that were outraged that we would consider him broken. Were there more of them than there were US players? Was the overall passion of the Chinese players greater or less than those of the US players? I have no idea. How to you even measure something like that? In the end, we tried to figure out how we could tone him down without wrecking those aspects that players really liked about him. Nearly every change to the game plays out similarly.

“You only talk in generalizations, not specifics.”

High level, long term design is what I do. That’s the only thing I feel comfortable discussing unless I’ve had a really recent discussion with someone on a specific topic. We have been trying to get more Rioters out here so you have a bigger chance of talking to someone who is working on your exact feature. But that’s also a two way street. I’ve been doing this a long time (sixteen years!), and it’s not really possible to scare me away from forums. But when we ask other Rioters why they don’t spend time doing it, the three most common answers are: I’m scared of saying the wrong thing, it takes a huge amount of time, and the environment feels hostile. To the extent you can make the environment more positive, you’ll see more participation. I’m not saying don’t criticize. I’m saying don’t be a stereotypical internet troll when you do. Yes, it’s part of our job and I will do what I can from my end to encourage more designers to be out here.

If there are other high level topics you would appreciate me tackling (not specifics like Cass reworks or the future of lore) I’d be happy do do so.

If I am remembering correctly, the concern was that fear was really random. Sometimes a feared target would run toward you and sometimes they would run away (a particularly sad reaction for Fiddlesticks). A little bit of unpredictability provides situations in which players have to make on-the-spot choices for how to react, which is a good test of mastery and reflexes. But when it feels like RNG has more effect on your performance than your decisions, that can be really frustrating. Crit is another example, but that’s a very long discussion.

We do some of this already, and may dive deeper into it. The main risks have to do with a sense of elitism. We already try to navigate a knife’s edge of perceptions about whether we design the game only for the pros or only for the average player. The thought that pros (or even top tiered players in general) might have a bat phone to reach the developers in a secret conversation in which other players can’t even participate rubs other players understandably the wrong way. The top-tiered players themselves get nervous of their comments being used against them, especially if it’s private correspondence that becomes leaked.

Finally, there are expert players who don’t have great insight into which changes would be good for the game overall, and there are Bronze players who can’t execute on plays but have a really good sense for specific changes that would improve the game for everyone. This is the whole “just because you eat a lot of good food, that doesn’t make you a chef,” argument.

Oh Linna, I’m glad to see that some thing never change. Our war shall never resolve!

On a serious note, I’m excited to crack open how to make a healer with gameplay in a PvP game. Vesh has worked very hard to try to make this a reality, and the previoust costs/downsides with things like blue healers or even other LoL champions don’t do well when you give a character bonkers haling to friends.

I’ve been against healing as a role a long time – I’ve learned my problems are with its execution and lack of decisions (for themselves or enemies) that’s problematic. So, we’ve take a stab at fixing that.

You should be scared as Soraka. You’re trying to heal people who should kill people and protect people for you. You can still buy GA and have 80% of the value in defense. You’re not going to have 4000 HP and 200 armor/100MR on Soraka. As a healer, being tanky WOULD be the natural build, so we have to prevent that case.

THIS can let us make a character who SUPPORTS by HEALING to an unprecendented degree in LoL. No one else can do this. You want support to change a game? You want new reasons to pick a character? I hear you – super clearly.

It’s definitely scary – on this we agree. I think there’s three conversation points:

1) I fundamentally believe if Soraka is allowed to get tanky, we’ll have to gut her. This release valve is there to prevent this and allow her to be good.

2) New Soraka is both more narrow and more unique. Picking Soraka is very different than picking another support. If we want champions to have a unique strategic identity and have a reason “to be played,” this is important.

3) The current passive can be tuned into obliteration if it’s actually a problem, but we need a release valve. I know Soraka wants AR/MR/HP – that’s why we have to discourage it or it will run afoul of 1), and Soraka will be gutted, and we might as well have not done anything and left her in the dumpster.

Tradeoffs are a huge component of good design, and sustainable champions. We’ve chosen these ones because we believe it will allow us to actually make a real healer character.

Yes – this is the first time we’ve done that. My expectation is not that people get super excited about this, but instead it makes it so she can function and not get kneecapped as soon as she’s good.

This design technique acts as a release valve for bullshit scenarios without requiring us to murder the core functions and unique abilities of the character. A Critical Guideline of Soraka is that she must be vulnerable to being killed while healing to allow her to be an insane health-refiller. This means we have to put preventative measures in there to ensure she stays what way – especially as items will be buffed/nerfed/added/removed long after Soraka’s out.

I think there’s validity in “how does one use mana?” as a conversation. It’s true mana’s not exciting – but mana is a good tradeoff to control lane pacing or large fights; and good decision-making through tradeoffs is good design (even if not from a directly “exciting” source).

For example, let’s look at Annie’s Q and passive. Without a mana gate, midlane Annie’s lane minigame is completely removed (and is a pretty fun lane minigame), and is likely to spam Q on cooldown to harass an enemy champion. The mana limitation controls this interaction from being “just go swat that guy” into a simple but important decision-tree in how you manage your mana.

Anivia has a great use of mana as a gate via her R, also.

We have marginalized mana a lot – I tend to think that’s a mistake, even if it feels good. Resourcesless champs don’t cause problems because thy’re weaker than mana champions, they cause problems because there’s no pacing aside from range and cooldown to manage their ability flow.

During the development of the radial menu, it become pretty clear that many people had issues with any more than 4. You couldn’t reliably hit the action you want and describing the motion became difficult.

I also fear that this is taking advantage of the menu in ways that could better fit in a different form.

What if there was a different way of using chat to quickly communicate these other ideas? Does placing it on the radial menu offer any benefits over that route?

What if there was just a binding that let you communicate some of these ideas in a directional manner? One neat idea that other MOBA games have done is being able to modifier + click on an ability to post the cooldown of it into chat.

Fo’ reals though:

We’ve poked at different ideas before (in experimentation, not anything that can be player delivered), and there’s definitely a lot of great opportunities here. I don’t think anyone is looking at the problem space at the moment however.

Anecdotal case: When we were first developing the radial menu, the left and right were actually swapped.

We actually had it internally for nearly 9 months before we released it IIRC (the team prioritized the then new HUD and the item shop above the radial menu so it got set aside for awhile). That’s a LOT of time to get familiar to something in play behavior.

Even now, personally, I will accidentally ping as though it was what it used to be because the menu optimized around muscle memory. We flipped it for good reasons, but it’s still quite disruptive as an individual.

That’s a type of disruption I would rather avoid if possible for other players. Again, muscle memory is super significant here.

That said, a few of us have played with the idea of other types of ping as well. Establishing a different input behavior rather than replacing an existing one could open us up to do more. (And it means we don’t let you guys sink in to the muscle memory case in the replacement version).

Very true – Cassiopeia – WHEN powerful – is a lane bully only. That’s why you pick her and what she does.

While we were doing a little texture update, we had a really fast, low-scope idea to help fix her up and make her into something other than a “remove ability to lane champion” and focus on the other identity she does have; AP super-carry.

We don’t balance around alternate maps. That’s why I don’t like the idea of more maps, because they erode the game for low benefit. I do think the proper way to FIGHT stagnation and staleness is to add identities to “why do I pick this champion instead of X?” Cass’s low-scope changes are an attempt to address that, as opposed to “I take her to beat the shit out of people when they can’t fight me.”

The top 200 challenger spots were protected by a concept called ‘clamping’ before Master Tier was introduced. This ensured the top 200 dudes on the server had both the highest LP and MMR. This greatly slowed gains and losses, making small gains appear normal. Removing clamping means gains (both up and down) are more fluid now. Since in some cases clamping was actually protecting players from falling down too quickly, these players will see some larger losses and smaller gains until they’re back where the system expects them to be.

In other tiers (bronze – plat) league standing is a very accurate mapping of player skill, but there is a buffer to slow players LP losses temporarily if they start to go on a losing trend. Since clamping was removed, but challenger and master must contain the very best players, the loss shielding is thinner in diamond than other tiers. In other words, gains and losses can feel more swingy.

Some of the gains and losses here do look a bit extreme but should become more stable over time. We’ll be monitoring how LP changes stabilize over the next few days and evaluating if we need to make adjustments or not based on the results.

This should have been more explicitly called out in our messaging around this to prepare players for the shift. I will work with the messaging team to update the original post around this.

Another entry in Riot’s design values dev blogs, this time covering giving players meaningful choices to make in the game.

Hey all,

It’s time for another entry in our ongoing series on the Design Values of League of Legends! Today we’ve got Lead Champion Designer Andrei “Meddler” Van Roon, here to talk about meaningful choices in League of Legends. This is a topic that goes fairly deep, so let’s just let him get started!

Chris ‘Pwyff’ Tom

To us, meaningful choices are one of the key things that allow a PvP game to have depth. The ability to make decisions that directly impact that state of the game is of absolute importance in driving satisfaction and mastery, and we always want to reward those make the best decisions.

Multiple attractive choices also allow for variety in experience, with games following many different paths. Meaningful choices (rather than single best choices) allow players to shape the state of the game based off their own preferences and what they feel they’re best at.

Meaningful choices require that the player have sufficient understanding of the consequences of their decisions. Without knowing (or at least being able to predict) what’s going to happen, a ‘choice’ of option basically becomes random. That’s not to say that the player needs to know every detail, or they need to see exactly how their decision will pan out – just enough to make an informed choice.

Significant difference between possible outcomes is also required. Clarity is nice, but if the choice is between a set of almost identical options – or if all choices result in the same, final outcome – there’s no significance to the choice in the first place.

It’s also important that the choices offered are actually accessible. If there are three possible choices of strategy but two can be executed by only the top 0.01% of players (reaction speed, required actions per second, etc) that effectively means there isn’t a choice either.

Finally, for a choice to be meaningful there need to be situations where multiple options are potentially valid. If there’s always one obvious correct answer, it’s not a choice but a puzzle to be solved. Sometimes it’s okay for there to be one right decision (see below), but games defined by questions that, once answered, stay answered forever (otherwise known as ‘solved games’) face the challenge of staying fresh (once again, if the focus is on meaningful PvP interactions).

Meaningful choice adds a lot to a game, but it’s not an essential part of every element. Skillshots or challenging combos, for example, can be satisfying skill tests for many, even if the correct play is the same every time. Additionally – and this is particularly true in story driven genres – plot, setting or character development can often justify a lack of choice.

In League, a lack of meaningful choice is worth accepting either because of the benefits a single option brings to the rest of the game, or because the choice is meaningful to other players. For example, participating in the vision game is almost mandatory if you want to be a successful team, but vision control in League of Legends creates a lot of interesting play – particularly around contested objectives.

Sometimes it’s better to simply not offer a choice in the first place. For example, having a deep, unified competitive scene on Summoner’s Rift – rather than a fragmented one split over multiple maps/modes – better supports our goals of making League of Legends a long-lasting, competitive game with deep potential for skill development. That’s not to say other maps or game modes don’t have interesting things to offer, but there are many benefits (and tradeoffs) for choosing to focus on one.

There are many different ways to present a meaningful choice, and I’ll run through a few examples:

Single versus Constant

Single choices often have a large impact on strategy and they commonly influence how future decisions in the game will be presented. This isn’t to say that single choices have right or wrong answers, but five strategically mismatched choices against five strategically cohesive choices can be very tough.

Utility mid like Lulu or an assassin like Zed?

Constant choices, on the other hand, are ones that influence the game by inches – each time you make a conscious decision, it’s just one step toward (or away from) victory.

Always Available versus Windowed

Choices that are always available are mostly related to mastery of efficiency. Knowing when to use something rarely wins a game single-handedly, but juggling the optimal timing of when to use many things is often what’s needed to edge out a close victory.

Should I use my potion when I’m near full health so that I can optimize my jungle efficiency? Should I save it if I’m thinking about recalling soon?

Windowed choices are ones that are only available under certain circumstances and can therefore carry more weight than always available ones. It’s like a form of efficiency, but also knowing what a windowed choice will lead to in the future.

While at the shop, do I spend my gold while I can, or do I save up for something I can’t afford yet? If I’m spending my gold, do I grab a Vamp Scepter or Boots and a Long Sword?

Tactical versus Strategic

Tactical choices are typically the ones that relate to pure combat mechanics and in-the-moment decision-making.

Which angle is Morgana going to fire Dark Binding at? Which way should I try and dodge, if at all?

Strategic choices, on the other hand, are ones that are focused on long-term decisions that dictate the pace and future opportunities within the game.

Do we try and fight them at Baron or do we let them have it while we go for an inhibitor?

While some of the above are direct examples of how we approach meaningful choices in League of Legends, I’d like to also look to the future before this entry gets too long.

While providing meaningful choices is a core value that we design around, it’s not something we’ve always delivered on well enough. As a result, there are a number of parts of the game we’re looking to make improvements to offer more interesting decision points. Have a few examples:

Strategy

We’d like League of Legends to have a broader range of possible options when it comes to how teams try to win a game. While this does rely heavily on champion diversity to influence strategy, we hope for there to be many ways to close out a game – through objective control, split pushing, straight teamfighting, getting strategic picks on solitary enemies, and beyond.

Champions

Some champions share too similar a niche with other champions, making the choice between them more a question of who’s more powerful than what particular skillset you want on your team. We try to emphasize this distinction where possible – for example, both Trundle and Jax are fighters, but they are picked for a team for very different reasons (initiation, disengage, and strength against tanky targets versus ramping damage with strong offensive scaling combined with a high effectiveness against auto attackers).

In contrast, Mundo and Shyvana do share a bit too similar a niche, with both being tanky fighters that deal AoE damage over an extended period of time as they try to wear down a target via movement speed. That’s not to say they’re bad champions or that there aren’t differences between them (one is better at long skirmishes, the other has superior initiation), but we can certainly be offering a more interesting choice between the two. Trying to find distinct gameplay spaces for champions is one of the core things we’re focusing on with both new champions and champion updates.

Items

Some roles have a range of interesting itemization choices throughout the game. AP casters, for example get to make choices like Tear of the Goddess or Fiendish Codex early, and Zhonya’s or Deathcap later on. Other roles, however, have fewer interesting options available to them. Marksmen have generally followed very similar build paths to each other with low variance. As a result, we’re trying to find ways to offer more distinct and appealing options, like the changes to Bloodthirster to better position it as a high end defensive AD item. In comparison, the old Bloodthirster – due to it having the highest AD in the game along with lifesteal – basically said, “Build this on every marksman that auto attacks or uses spells” (that is, all of them).

The above are just a few examples of where we think we can offer more meaningful choices for the future of League of Legends. Remember that this can go even more in-depth in systems like summoner spells, runes, masteries, or even lane positions on the map itself. Also, if you think there are unique opportunities where we can offer more depth or places where you think we’ve failed to offer sufficient choice, feel free to leave a comment below.